1. Field
The present invention relates to the collecting of personal information including demographic data (user's profile), of a cellular mobile communications system (CMCS) device's user and then monitoring and correlating that user's CMCS events to that user's profile. The events tracked may include standard cell phone events that the CMCS device is capable of, such as receiving and sending standard cell phone calls to another person or persons. The events tracked may also include the receiving and sending of short text messages (SMS), the receiving and sending of enhanced messages (EMS), or the receiving and sending of multimedia messages (MMS). Other events that may be monitored and correlated to the CMCS user profile include downloading games from the CMCS carrier, downloading ring tones, receiving and sending instant messages (IM), the receipt of “push” notifications, downloading web pages that may include, among other things, sports scores, weather forecasts, stock quotes and movie listings. The movie listings may be localized for the area from the area that CMCS device is being used or from another geographic area. Other events may include viewing advertisements and making purchases. The number of different activities and uses that a CMCS is capable of is continually increasing. The present invention is capable of capturing these future activities and usages (events) and correlating said events to the profile recorded for the CMCS device's user.
2. Description of Related Art
To determine how a CMCS device is used by a person, from whom voluntary and permissible profile data has been obtained, can be important information to the provider of services for the CMCS industry. Using techniques such as having the user fill out survey forms or keep a written log of phone usage or even sending inquiries via microbrowser enabled web pages are all subject to error due to incompleteness, user time constraints or forgetfulness. Although metering software, tracking CMCS usage, that is embedded in a CMCS operating system (OS) is well known in the art, what is needed is a method of collecting rich and complete profile data from a CMCS device user, whereby such collection does not require the use of the CMCS device to input that profile data. The reason to not use a CMCS device to collect the profile data is that a CMCS device is limited in how the interaction experience occurs. But to still be able to maintain the capability of correlating that personal and demographic data of the user to the usage of a particular CMCS device is important even though the user profile information was not obtained by the use of the CMCS device. The presently explained method of capturing a user's profile data via a fully featured web browser, making the user's experience less onerous than trying to collect the same rich profile data via the limited capability browsers available in most CMCS devices, is unique in the industry. Trying to initially acquire such profile data from the CMCS user using a CMCS device can be time consuming and many times frustrating due to the limitations of interaction often inherent in CMCS devices. These limitations include small viewing screen size, small or nonexistent keyboards, cost of the cell time used, latency of the network, and limited information contained in the decks presented to the user. Therefore the need is to have the capability of obtaining rich demographic data from a CMCS device user and being able to seamlessly tie that data to the particular CMCS device whereupon the event activities that the CMCS device is engaged in are captured and related back to that specific user.
The demographic, lifestyle and even perhaps psychological profiles of the CMCS user can be easily captured using the present invention. Besides the typical demographic data such as age, sex, income, political affiliation and residence address; personal lifestyle data can also be requested, such as magazines subscribed to, favorite hobbies, favorite authors, type of vehicle/s owned, vacations contemplated, TV viewing habits, and stores shopped at. A third area of inquiry may even include a short psychological questionnaire relating to personality aspects of the CMCS device's user. An example of this aspect is a measure of the user's patience. This may be important to know because the information presented to the CMCS user may be richer and therefore slower to download or briefer and more quickly downloaded.
The ultimate consumers of the correlated personal and demographic data with the usage of the CMCS device may desire that even more profile data be obtained from a segment of the population from whom data has already been collected. By having the email addresses, obtained in the course of implementing the present invention, of those segments of profiled persons the information consumer is interested in, those segments may then be asked additional questions related to the ultimate information consumer's interest.
The present invention disclosed accomplishes these tasks.